Fake archives and fictional (id)entities, the publication and suppression of content, hoaxes and spoofs… These methods have objectives that are ideological, humorous, and artistic, but also financial when it involves stealth marketing, organized swindles, or professional counterfeiters in the realm of fake art, for example. Current technologies, moreover, make it easier to invent these fictional persons, spyware applications, websites that are mere fronts for other darker activities, identity theft, spam, scams, and fraud 149 serving a wide range of interests.

During the Sarkozy/Royal presidential debate for the 2007 election, for instance, the Wikipage devoted to the EPR nuclear reactor in France was stormed by party activists and tampered with in order to transform an error made by one of the speakers into truth. If resorting to interactivity in the production of data, be it with Wikipedia or other participatory computer programs, is indeed transforming the status of the consumer into a producer of knowledge, these new information possibilities are heightening awareness of the inconsistency of the limits between the subjective and the objective, true and false. Nevertheless, the digital extensions that now construct our daily reality only point up the processes of construction that are inherent in any form of knowledge. Already back in 1996, the New York University physics professor Alan Sokal submitted to a scientific journal an intentionally flawed article that was “liberally salted with nonsense” and “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions,” as part of an experiment demonstrating the fragility of the production of certain kinds of knowledge.[1]

Yet when Paul Lafargue declared in 1883 that “our epoch will be called the ‘Adulteration Age’, just as humanity’s early epochs received the names of the ‘Stone Age’ and the ‘Bronze Age’ from the character of their production,”[2] he was referring to the general system of production, to those objects designed to disappear, whose very consistency targets their alteration. Ideology then is inserted even in the manufacturing of the most common of objects, and their precariousness points to the sham objects used on film sets, creating a definite juncture between reality and fiction.

The technique also materializes a more fundamental relationship with the world. For the psychiatrist Donald W. Winnicott, for example, illusion is the very foundation of our condition. As he sees it, moreover, the “false self,” which conceals the individual’s personality, makes it possible to defend oneself in an abnormal environment. Sometimes this mask, which recalls Sartrian bad faith, confines the individual in a mystification that, while reassuring, is destructive to freedom. The simultaneous protection and display of identity provoke opposing reactions, currently, for example, a fresh burst of ways to camouflage one’s private life along with an increase in the number of tools for tracking people and tracing data. Vilified or valued, falsification appears to be a process that is inherent to the production of human reality, even in the field of memory. Indeed, “artists are those who produce the greatest number of fake memories,” says Martial Van der Linden, the professor and director of the cognitive psychopathology studies at the University of Geneva, for “they have greatest capacity to mentally imagine erroneous information and hence that information seems more real to them.”[3]The Incessant Ones refers then to the tireless producers of reality that we all are, especially artists, in both public and private space, through the permanent creation of the world that surrounds us.

Evénements liés

01.04.2016 - 6:00 pm

Opening

From 6:00 PM

26.04.2016 - 6:30 pm

Guided Visit

At 6:30 PM

(6€, free entrance for members)

26.04.2016 - 7:30 pm

Screening

At 7:30 PM. (7€, 5€ for members)

The scheduled evening screening is a true extension of the exhibition and its program focuses on such figures as the double agent, the scammer, and hackers, as well as differences of perception and identity produced by the media.

As part of the current show, the book store ORAIBI + BECKBOOKS is hosting the launch of Headless.

For this detective novel published under the name K.D., the writer John Barlow was hired as a ghostwriter by the artist duo Goldin + Senneby to investigate “Headless,” an offshore company registered in the Bahamas. During the investigation, the author finds himself involved in the decapitation of a Nassau policeman. Headless then becomes a frantic race through the world of high finance by an English writer in the hands of a secret society made up of the economic elite who will stop at nothing to preserve their power. Headless is inspired by the Acéphale review and secret society founded in 1936 by Georges Bataille, who was obsessed with human sacrifice at the time.

To launch Headless, Goldin + Senneby have invited Jan Blanc, Tiphanie Blanc, Allison Huetz and Céline Poulin to come and talk about confidence games, whether artistic or no, and the pleasures of fiction that catches up with reality. The discussion will revolve around a reading of several excerpts from the book.

As part of Friction(s) festival organized by Château Rouge, and to mark the closing of the exhibition “Les Incessants” , the artist Yan Tomaszewski is offering an open workshop in which everyone takes part and performs. Mining a surrealist vein, he is calling the workshop “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

“In June 1924, a working group made up of Czechoslovakian artists, writers, and politicians gathered in Prague to define the identity of their new nation. For a week they devoted themselves to exercises in divination that crystallized the Czechoslovakian spirit for years thereafter. Together we are going to summon the one and only motif towards which all of those exercises pointed: the mysterious motif of the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog.”

The Franco-Polish artist Yan Tomaszewski lives and works in Paris. He has had solo shows at Catapult (Antwerp, 2016), the Kronika Contemporary Art Center (Bytom, 2015), the Middelheim Museum (Antwerp, 2015), the Muzeum Sztuki (Lodz, 2014), the Asymetria Gallery (Warsaw, 2013), and Primo Piano (Paris, 2012). He has also taken part in the following group shows, Nouveau Festival (Pompidou Center, 2015), Le Salon des Testeurs, (Chalet Society, Paris, 2013), Manifesta 9, The Deep of the Modern (Genk, 2012), and Salon de Montrouge, (Montrouge, 2011).